


In All Possible Ways

by opalheart12



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Eventual Romance, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Introspection, M/M, aggressively requited love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:27:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28262361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opalheart12/pseuds/opalheart12
Summary: He’s the one who ends up alone. For as long as Yusuf has been alive, that has been the universal truth that underscores his life.———OR: Joe and Nicky’s progression from enemies to friends to lovers throughout their immortal lives.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	In All Possible Ways

He’s the one who ends up alone.

For as long as Yusuf has been alive, that has been the universal truth that underscores his life. But then he  _ didn’t  _ die on that battlefield in Jerusalem when a broadsword sliced through his abdomen as though it were a knife cutting through butter. And when he woke up and saw the Ligurian standing over him with fascinated horror on his face, he  _ didn’t  _ want anything more in that moment than to die all over again. So, Yusuf being the little shit he was from the moment he was born decided to antagonize said Ligurian by spitting out all the Greek insults he’d picked up on in the ports with his father. 

As predicted, the other man took offense—he must have been able to understand some or most of what Yusuf spat out at him—and broke his neck. When he woke up again in the field outside Jerusalem, the bodies of fallen soldiers from both sides surrounding him and the stench of blood and war in the air, he was alone. 

It was another nine days before he encountered the mysterious Frank from his dreams who’d already killed him  _ twice _ . He found him in Antioch at a bathhouse of all places. Yusuf would be lying if he said the look of surprise and shock on the man’s face as he held him down under the water to drown him didn’t make him laugh. The man returned the favor as Yusuf expected he might two weeks later in Tarsus when he shot an arrow through his head while he was in the middle of his morning prayers.

Yusuf woke from the clutches of darkness with a rage so monstrous it felt as though it were physically shaping him into a different person. That time, it took only a couple of hours for him to find the other man. He stood over him as he slept in the small room at the back of an inn that may as well have been a closet. His eyes shot open just as Yusuf pulled the blade of his scimitar across the man’s neck, spraying blood all over the walls and ceilings. He doesn’t stick around this time.

Five months pass and Yusuf is still alone.

His family were, for the most part, killed by the soldiers from the west who’d accused them of being demons that God wanted removed from the earth. Yusuf had a hard time believing that anyone could look at his mother Fatima, his sisters Khadija and Sumaya, and his little brothers Moussa, Saladin, and Abdul and see anything demonic about them. Only his mother remained, but not for long. Yusuf hadn’t been able to stop her from hanging herself in the old oak tree that grew in the courtyard of the home he’d grown up in. 

He mourned at the feet of his dead mother for days before he got the courage to cut her down and give her the proper burial his siblings had been denied. 

••••••••••••••••

Nicolo has been a friend to loneliness and shame for all of his life. He was an orphan who’d been raised in a monastery by a distant uncle and abbott from his mother’s side of the family. He didn’t know much about his parents other than his father was a drunk who was killed in a bar fight just weeks before Nicolo was born and his mother died shortly after having him. His uncle had never been affectionate to him in any way and generally preferred to live as if Nicolo didn’t exist. 

He supposed that was fine since, as long as his uncle wasn’t paying him any attention, Nicolo didn’t have to attend church except at Easter and Christmas. Most of his uncle’s friends had no clue he was there except the other monks and they too went out of their way to pretend that Nicolo didn’t exist. It wasn’t until the Pope’s call for the crusades reached his ears that Nicolo decided to shirk off his invisibility. Perhaps God might finally remember he existed if he killed people in his name. 

As predicted, God ignored him too, and it would be another eight hundred years—though he didn’t know this at the time—before he would be able to come to terms with all the bad things he’d done. 

_ You are no son of mine _ , he imagined God saying to him.  _ You are nothing I created. _

It wasn’t until his death at the inn at the hands of the Syrian that he realized he didn’t want to fight anymore. He’d shot the man whilst in the middle of his prayers. It was an awful, ugly thing to do and he would never forgive himself for it as long as he lived, and that would be a very long time. 

Five months slipped by as Nicolo attempted to find his fellow immortal. The dreams refused to yield any usable clues as to where he might be but some part of him felt like he was being guided toward the man anyway. He came to Aleppo and felt his body pull him to a once beautiful home not far from the city market. 

He knew it must have been beautiful at some point but clearly had fallen to disrepair. It hadn’t been long, though. The vines hadn’t had a chance to stretch to their full potential and swallow the house whole like it never existed in the first place.

He found the man standing over a mound of freshly turned dirt with wreaths of flowers on top. His shoulders shook as he wept. As Nicolo crept closer to him he saw that he was holding several things in his arms: two homemade dolls that wore different dresses, a small clay figurine of a lion, a roughly cut mirror with a copper lining on the outside, and two leather bound books. 

The man turned around upon hearing his footsteps and clutched the collection of things closer to his chest as if fearing Nicolo might take them away from him. 

He spat something at Nicolo that he didn’t understand but the meaning was quite clear from the angry fire that sparked in the man’s eyes and the way he spit at Nicolo’s feet.

There was nothing for Nicolo to do but allow shame to swallow him whole.

••••••••••••••••

They find each other in Nicosia fifty years later. 

Both of them have hardened to the ways of the world. There is a permanent grief and pain in their eyes that wasn’t there all those years ago. They look a little different now, which is why Yusuf doesn’t notice him right away.

The man’s hair reaches the middle of his back, though he keeps it tied at the base of his neck in a ponytail. He has grown a generous beard that diminishes all the stronger features of his face, as if he doesn’t want to draw any attention to himself. Yusuf notices him all the same; his eyes were always difficult to miss once you’d seen them. 

Yusuf, for his part, was different too. He’d shaved off his beard and allowed his dark curly hair to grow as much as he could stand—which wasn’t much—so that it reached the base of his neck while still curly. 

The man said something to him. Fifty years ago, Yusuf wouldn’t have been able to make heads nor tails of it. But he’d been studying various languages now and was fluent in four he hadn’t known before Jerusalem: Latin, Occitan, Farsi, and Ligurian. His Greek was impeccable now, which was how he finally was able to understand what the man said. 

“Will you kill me again?” He asked.

Yusuf’s gaze gored a hole through the man’s body; or, it felt like it did anyway. “I don’t possess the will to.” He surprised himself to find it was true. The rage that had strangled him for the first thirty years of his immortal life had mostly ebbed away, replaced with sadness and unrelenting grief laced nostalgia.

“I find that I do not possess the will to kill you either.” The man sat down at the table in the tavern with Yusuf and ordered Florentian wine. 

Yusuf hasn’t been a practicing Muslim in fifteen years. He found it hard to when he still couldn’t make sense of why he’d been given immortality and his family had not. It didn’t  _ feel  _ like a blessing from Allah. It felt a lot like a curse. Since Yusuf had arrived at that line of thinking he’d shirked off most of his dietary and alcohol restrictions. He still prayed, but it was once a day for only a few seconds, more from a force of habit than anything.

And it was there, in a tavern in Nicosia, that the two men drank and talked and cried over Florentian wine before coming to a very drunk agreement that they were duty bound by the universe to travel through the world together side by side for as long as they had this gift of immortality. 

**Author's Note:**

> What do you think? Should I add more to this?


End file.
